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local cryptid

@bog-body-in-training

Ki || any pronouns || 21 || chaotic neutral disaster || rip to all who follow

do you ever think about how if you dive into the ocean and go deeper and deeper you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light, and if you go up into the sky and go higher and higher you will pass through layers of darker and darker blue until everything is black and cold and the pressure will be so intense that it will kill you without protection but if you keep going you will find little glowing specks of light

sometimes a post makes you get out of bed at 230am to spend a quick hour on something like this

A few months back, I read about a study that found that people who were told to regularly think about things they’re grateful for reported significantly improved physical and mental well-being at the end of the study. So I started going for a walk every day before work and making myself come up with 5 things that I’m grateful for. And I know it sounds like the most cornball shit ever, but it has fundamentally changed my brain chemistry.

I was aware that I was becoming a little bit too much of a sarcastic little hater before I started this experiment. Now I am almost startled to catch myself saying shit like, “Wow, look at the flowers on that tree, I am so grateful I decided to walk this way,” unironically, completely unprompted, and outside of the specific time in the day when I do the gratitude practice. I’ve rewired my brain to look for things to be grateful for, and so I look around me more and find more of them, which makes me feel happier, which makes me find even more good things.

For the record, I’m not saying, “Only think positive thoughts! No bad vibes!” Toxic positivity is probably about as unhealthy as only thinking negative thoughts. Sometimes shit does just suck. I’m not telling you to be grateful for the bad things around you. Being a sarcastic little hater definitely has its place. But setting aside like 2 minutes per day to come up with 5 things you’re grateful for will genuinely improve your outlook. It doesn’t have to be big stuff—sometimes the best I can manage is simple shit like, “I’m grateful that zippers were invented,” but even that forces me to be in the present moment and deepens my appreciation of the world around me. Try it, even if you have to do it badly or sarcastically at first. Even if you only do it so that you can come back and tell me I’m wrong in 3 months. Set a daily alarm on your phone and give it a try.

Neuroplasticity let’s go!!!! You can absolutely train your brain to see more positivity, and our behaviors and actions can impact how we think and our mental state. I honestly need to do this more often.

It's a fantastic point, but John Boyega's net worth also puts him at $6 million. When he says eat the rich, he isn't safe either...

There’s a pretty big fucking difference between six million and one trillion lmao

Not to mention the way the money was made

An actor being paid for a role / doing some advertising is a world away form a man setting up a cooperate money machine that horrendously exploits workers

This is something I hate SO MUCH about how tumblr talks about money.

Like, I get that famous actors have large amounts of money, some of them are even probably overpaid (I have complicated thoughts about how actors are paid because of the nature of acting as a career), but they are exchanging labor for money, and their salaries are an expense involved in making a movie.

But like... an actor is paid for a job. They’re a worker like the rest of us. Bezos isn’t paid for a job, he’s paid for being the person who owns Amazon and despite being obscenely wealthy, he does all sorts of shitty things and to underpay and exploit his workers, and avoid paying taxes, so that more of the money Amazon generates will be profit (worker’s salaries are not profit, they’re a business expense). 

These two mechanisms of acquiring money are fundamentally very different. 

The reason why billionaires are evil aren’t because having money is bad, its because to get a billion dollars you have to cheat. You have to take it from someone else. If Bezos paid all his workers and suppliers fairly and treated them well, and paid his fair amount of taxes, and etc, then it literally wouldn’t matter how much money he earned, because he wouldn’t be doing anyone any harm. But its not actually possible to amass a billion dollars (a full order of magnitude bigger than a million) while behaving in an ethical manner. 

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The last post is everything.

Also wanna say that John Boyega specifically does a lot of proper grassroots good work and actively puts himself in a position where he knows the racists will keep on coming for him, to actively and materially help marginalised communities.

The fact a black man is never able to say a single word without being criticised is not being missed btw.

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constantly devastated by the world we lost due to aids

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The battles that rose out of the AIDs epidemic were access to marriage and military service. When once the Queer community was focused on creating the best art and living lives worth telling stories about, the 1990's brought on a new goal: How to best fit in. As the brilliant Fran Bebowitz has said many times, the first people who died of AIDS were the interesting ones. The artists. There's a reason that arts became Ghostbusters and Cats in the 1990s. Because all of the really talented artists were dying. The rule-breakers. The ones who weren't afraid to shake things up. And the audience died with them. "Now we don't have any kind of discerning audience. When that audience died- and that audience died in five minutes. Literally people didn't die faster in war. And it allowed of course, like the second, third, fourth tier to rise up to the front. Because of course, the first people who died of AIDS were the people who… I don't know how top put this… got laid a lot. OK. Now imagine who didn't get AIDS. That's who was then lauded as like - the great artists." - Fran Lebowitz So many of the gays left alive once the Clinton Administration came into being were, to be frank, the boring ones. Gays who knew nobody and who nobody knew, and they rose to the top of the community and therefore their priorities rose to the top of the community as well. And what did they want? Apparently, they wanted to join the army and have big gay weddings. General employment non-discrimination wasn't all that important to them. Making sexuality and gender identity a protected class, along with sex, race, and religion, wasn't that important to them. They wanted marriage and military. Because they were the good gays. Not the naughty gays who were sleeping around and dying of AIDS. Not the poor gays who couldn't make political contributions. They were the gays with families and commitment ceremonies and office jobs and houses. They were the good ones. The ones who would look fantastic and incredibily marketable when they were interviewed by CNN. They were the gays who straight people would look at and say to themselves: "Maybe they're not so bad after all. I still don't want my kid to be gay. But maybe it's okay if Bob and Henry got married." The gay rights movement shifted from 'Accept us for who we are' to 'We'll be whatever you want us to be if you accept us.' And it's kind of remained that way over the last thirty years. We've been trained to be offended by queers who step too far out of the mainstream. Plenty, and I mean plenty, of gays online were on edge when Billy Porter started showing up to awards shows in dresses. Lots, and I mean lots, of gays were unnerved and worried when trans people started coming out of their own closets. Some going so far as to disavow the T from LGBT because they were worried people who don't like trans people would lop in the gay men and women in with them. Who needs community when you've already got your house in the suburbs, right?
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... what the fuck.

You know, you'd think that someone who wrote an essay about queer people selling each other out for cishet approval would agree with this, and to a certain extent, I do, at least in the outcomes and effects, but this excerpt contains a number of deeply wrong and deeply fucked up things to say.

The big pushes for marriage equality and military service were responses to things done to us. They weren't the malicious behavior of a bunch of second-rate, shitty gays (holy fuck, what the fuck, measuring people's artistic prowess and social importance by how much they got laid? James, what the fuck). The push for marriage equality got bigger and louder because of the AIDS epidemic. Because we were denied entry into the hospital rooms and funerals of our loved ones. Because sometimes all families left behind when they cleared out everything in a shared apartment was a fucking box fan. Because people lost their homes when their partners died. Because people were buried under the wrong names, or unclaimed by family and unable to be claimed by the people who loved them.

The push for military service equality? That happened as a pushback against active campaigns to out queer people and drive them out of military service. Like it or not, military service has become (by intent on the part of the Department of Defense) a way out of poverty for a lot of people, and queer people? Well, we tend to be poorer than others. Protecting people's ability to serve in the military meant protecting that path out of poverty for a lot of queer people, meant protecting health care, meant protecting housing, meant protecting lots and lots of things.

A friend of mine was expelled from the military under Don't Ask, Don't Tell. He'd been in almost long enough to have a pension, and he pissed someone off who knew he was gay. When I talked to him about it when DADT was repealed, he was still bitter about it -- he and his now-husband couldn't at the time get VA loans or any benefits for his years and years of service. There are at least a hundred thousand people who were expelled from military service for being gay from WWII until its repeal in 2011. Most of those people still have their records showing an other than honorable discharge, and so they and their families are not receiving benefits to which they are otherwise entitled.

Again, this push was a pushback against an active Republican campaign to drive queer people out of public life, one which was used by Republicans in order to stir up their base into a froth over the concept of gays tainting the pure American way of life. There were accusations of gays attempting to undermine the military in the 90s, lots of talk about how the very presence of queers in that space would sully it immeasurably, ruin the American way of life. (Lots of talk about 'combat readiness' and I heard people talking about not wanting 'faggots in foxholes.')

Sound familiar?

Is there a problem with respectability politics in the queer community? Yes. Does that problem with respectability politics undermine our ability to make meaningful change? Yes, absolutely. But we need to refrain from this absolutely fucking asinine and totally untrue reframing of the narrative to blame respectability politics for decisions made out of desperation by people under attack, and we one fucking hundred percent do not need this gross "the survivors were the losers who didn't fuck" narrative, as if one's sexual prowess has anything to do with one's worth as an artist or a human being.

That's fucking disgusting, and James Somerton should be ashamed for even thinking that, much less putting those words in that order and putting them out into the world. My worth as an artist -- and yes, a queer artist -- has nothing to do with who I fuck or how much I fuck or how many partners I fuck. It says a lot about the art world and who gets to rise to the top in it -- the pretty, the popular, the fuckable -- that people think so, though.

Yes, the community has a problem with respectability politics -- I have been loudly saying so for years -- but the response to that can't be grading people by their transgressiveness and fuckability. It just creates a new metric by which you can be found a Worthy Queer.

And we sure as shit need to not reframe the desperate actions of people trying to protect their livelihoods, their homes, and their access to health care from an active and aggressive onslaught of Republican politicians using them as wedge issues as the petty and frivolous concerns of a bunch of no-talent suburban sissies. That shit is just as fucking exhausting. Authentic queer liberation must include the ability to be fucking boring if one desires without incurring whatever this dramatic and ahistorical bullshit rewrite is.

This is more punk than the whole of punk history.

I’ll tell you what’s ferocious. Freddie’s comeback to Sid calling him “Freddie Platinum” when they were recording down the hall from each other at London’s Wessex Studios (Queen for News of the World, Pistols for Bollocks).

Sid Vicious made the mistake one day of bursting into Queen’s control room and antagonizing their frontman. “Have you succeeded in bringing ballet to the masses, then?” he sneered. “Oh, yes, Simon Ferocious,” Mercury replied. “We’re trying our best, dear.” 

Then, according to Queen biographer Daniel Nester, Freddie rose from his chair and began to playfully flick the safety pins displayed on the front of Sid’s leather jacket. “Tell me,” he asked, “did you arrange these pins just so?” When Sid stepped forward in an attempt to intimidate Freddie, the singer simply pushed him backwards and inquired, “What are you going to do about it?” Sid immediately backed down. [x]

Freddie Mercury may very well have had the biggest dick energy of anyone who ever lived

Still feels weird that the same band made "You're Gonna Go Far, Kid" and "Pretty Fly (For A White Guy)"

It's like if Smash Mouth and Fall Out Boy were one band.

The Offspring are honestly a contender for the funniest punk band ever, made even funnier by the fact that Dexter Holland is pushing 60 now and has a PhD in virology.

Like imagine being on an academic committee and reviewing a dissertation on HIV protein-encoding genomes and it's from a guy with frosted tips whose greatest legacy is the Crazy Taxi soundtrack.

That's the Offspring.

This exact thing happened in the 70's/80's in this country when seatbelts were first being pushed for. Reagan literally tried to get rid of them.

There were also examples of anti-seatbelt activists dying in car crashes where they weren’t wearing seat belts like that guy that wrote an anti-seatbelt article and four months later died in a car crash where he didn’t have a seat belt on and was thrown out of the vehicle

Of course it was fucking Reagan

i am never talking to a cishet person again. did you know some of these people believe that watching porn is cheating

queers are out here having five dimensional sex and cishets are living in the stone age...... we have to enlighten them......

WE HAVE TO FUCKING HELP THEM WHAT DO YOU MEAN MASTURBATING IS CHEATING . CHEATING WITH WHO.